30 January 2014

No more As all around

A few years ago, I wrote about Denis Rancourt, a professor who gave every student in his class an A. I listened to an interview with him, and he did it because he didn’t like how pursuit of grades interfered with the intrinsic satisfaction of learning.

He was fired, and even though he had tenure, and that decision has been upheld by an arbitrator.

By all accounts, though, he did much more than just give a highly skewed distribution of grades. He liked breaking rules generally, and admitted as much. It’s possible that factored into his firing.